Editorial

On the up

Paul O'Neil

Having read the press release from the Swiss Exhibitors Committee at Baselworld, which was sent out on Valentine’s Day, it looks like we can expect a continuation of the trend already seen at the SIHH for more classic watch designs pitched at more affordable prices.

Echoes I have heard from other brands over the past couple of weeks would appear to substantiate this. Corum had a great year last year, although the brand was admittedly starting from a low base, and Carl F. Bucherer did well, too, and has seen a very positive evolution over the first few weeks of 2017. The Lucerne based brand is also building on a trend for champagne coloured dials that emerged last year, as seen on its first Baselworld 2017 preview model, the Manero Flyback. Official export figures for January, scheduled to be released by the Federation of the Swiss Watchmaking industry tomorrow, will show whether this trend can be extrapolated to the industry as a whole.

Later this week, Olivier Müller kicks off a mini-series of articles on dual-time watches. Inspired by a discussion we had during the SIHH, which was triggered by a brand that wished to differentiate between its universal time display and a world time function, the first article looks at the different types of time zone functions and displays. The second article in the series, which will be published next week, will take a more pedantic approach, looking at the difference between two apparently similar, yet intrinsically different abbreviations: GMT and UTC.

Time as we know it is, of course, an artificial construct that mankind invented to simplify our everyday lives. Our 24-hour days and 60-minute hours are conveniently close to time as the fourth dimension of the space-time continuum. But what is good enough for most people is not sufficient for astronomers, who use sidereal time, based on the Earth’s rotation, in order to locate celestial objects. Vacheron Constantin has pioneered a new “tropical gear train” that can display sidereal time either poetically, as is the case with its Copernicus artistic crafts models, or scientifically, as on the Celestia Astronomical. Tomorrow I take a closer look at the technology behind this. Bovet also presented an astronomical watch with similar functions, but implemented using another, equally innovative approach. Find out more in my article later this week.